What Is It and How You Can Protect Yourself from It


GIFShell Attack

Organizations and security teams work to protect themselves from any vulnerability, and often don’t realize that risk is also brought on by configurations in their SaaS apps that have not been hardened. The newly published GIFShell attack method, which occurs through Microsoft Teams, is a perfect example of how threat actors can exploit legitimate features and configurations that haven’t been correctly set. This article takes a look at what the method entails and the steps needed to combat it.

The GifShell Attack Method

Discovered by Bobby Rauch, the GIFShell attack technique enables bad actors to exploit several Microsoft Teams features to act as a C&C for malware, and exfiltrate data using GIFs without being detected by EDR and other network monitoring tools. This attack method requires a device or user that is already compromised.

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The main component of this attack allows an attacker to create a reverse shell that delivers malicious commands via base64 encoded GIFs in Teams, and exfiltrates the output through GIFs retrieved by Microsoft’s own infrastructure.

How does it work?

  • To create this reverse shell, an attacker must first compromise a computer to plant the malware — which means the bad actor needs to convince the user to install a malicious stager, like with phishing, that executes commands and uploads command output via a GIF url to a Microsoft Teams web hook.
  • Once the stager is in place, the threat actor creates their own Microsoft Teams tenant and contacts other Microsoft Teams users outside of the organization.
  • The threat actor can then use a GIFShell Python script to send a message to a Microsoft Teams user that contains a specially crafted GIF. This legitimate GIF image has been modified to include commands to execute on a target’s machine.
  • When the target receives the message, the message and the GIF will be stored in Microsoft Team’s logs. Important to note: Microsoft Teams runs as a background process, so the GIF does not even need to be opened by the user to receive the attacker’s commands to execute.
  • The stager monitors the Teams logs and when it…

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